I personally think copying is a valid method of learning, just as long as your end goal is to learn from the experience and not to simply copy.

That's my thinking too

In regards to .gif animations I wholeheartedly recommend purchasing GraphicsGale, it's very very cheap for art software. If you really don't want to shell out the money you can still export sheets and image sequences in the free version if I recall, just a matter of getting a free software to turn that export into a .gif.

I like it and from what I've read it seems to be well recommended, so I bought it

Should I try and learn some traditional drawing as well because I can't draw at all. Maybe to draw simple pose figures to plan my pixel characters?

Welcome to Pixelation.

Thanks

Yeah, Ninja Gaiden is the inspiration for the game and I want that to reflect on the characters and animation as well. This is a first draft so I copied Ryus sprites to learn how game sprites are made but I will start to differentiate it more in the future. I'm using these sprites + ninja gaiden sprites as placeholders when testing the game for now.

I still want to keep the basic pose from Ryu and probably the anime style running (but I'll try the upper body movement just to learn how to do it and see what it looks like).

PixelPiledriver (another rasslin fan? ), thats really nice, something like that is what I'm going for as I try and develop my own style. But as I said I just started learning and I might do some more copying for now to learn how others did it and then try to start something from the scratch.

One problem I'm debating now on the design level is that I find more "childish" characters of the 8bit era with their big heads etc have more character (Mega Man for example), but my game's story is dark and mature so I feel like a more "realistic" character is needed. Problem is realistic 8bit characters often look boring with their squinty one pixel eyes, realistic body proportions and blocky heads...

Thanks for the answers. I'll come back with v.2.0 at some point. Might take some time, have to divide my time between pixel art, programming, studies/thesis and life :-]

Still haven't found the perfect tutorial, though. I went through these http://wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3467.0  but many of them don't exist anymore or are not right for me. Learn by doing I guess and looking at references. Thsi was an OK read, though http://superwalrusland.com/ohr/issue63/lp/lp.html

Btw, I've been using the free version of GraphicsGale which annoyingly doesn't work with GIFs. Should I fork over the 15€ for it, or are the better free options?

Hi all just registered,
I'm making an old school platformer game. I've never done any pixel art (or art of any kind really ). I started trying to make the main character with GraphicsGale to try and learn this stuff so I can someday hopefully make my own art for my games.

Any good tutorials to check out (creating very simple 8bit style game art)?

Here's my character, hes supposed to have a grey sleeveless top of some kind, grey pants, red gauntlets, purple belt and scabbard for the sword and some white boots. The red/black thing on his back is supposed to look like a cape... :-p

Tips on how to make him look better? This is the amount of detail I want to make it look like an NES game

standing


running cycle. I don't know how to make an animation yet